Let me get this out of the way first: Jeff Bridges absolutely deserves his Oscar nomination for his performance in Crazy Heart.  He’s always been a favorite of mine, ever since his enigmatic, incomprehensible performance in 1993’s Fearless, and he is superb in this film.  He plays Bad Blake, a broken-down alcoholic, a former country superstar gone to seed, and he lives the role as if he were born to play it.  He’s a stumbling drunk, a songwriting genius, a charming, nice guy who is also totally self-centered, a rogue and a walking dead man.  It’s a great acting performance.

That’s the good: now the bad.  The movie is intense, often painfully so, and if you have a history of alcoholism in your family, some of the scenes are going to make you uncomfortable.  At least they did me, but that may be partially the result of natural sensitivities in addition to my own family history.   Some parts of the movie were HARD.

A surprising delight was Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a single mom who falls into Bad Blake’s universe, and, even after a lifetime of bad decisions, continues to make them, to near-catastrophic effect.  I won’t give up the plot line, but Jeanie says at one point that having a relationship with an alcoholic is “like living with a rattlesnake”, and her family feels the bite.  She’s a surprisingly beautiful actress and exudes a sensuality that I’d missed in the other roles I’ve seen her in.  Her characterization runs the wire – from frank and strong to weak and vulnerable, angry and tender and needy and distant.  She deserves her Best Supporting Actress nomination and I hope she wins it (although Vera Farmiga in Up In The Air was spectacular also).

I’m not 100% convinced yet that the ending is the one I would have hoped for.  Again, without giving too much away, I feel it could have been more dramatic and of a piece with the rest of the story.  The movie is based on the book by Thomas Cobb, so I assume it follows more or less faithfully the plot line of the novel, but still…

Worth seeing?  Absolutely.  The acting performances are amazing.  I’m surprised that the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, in a year that has Inglorious Basterds, Up, and A Serious Man among the Best Picture nominees – all of which I panned in various ways.